Portsnap: a Ports Collection Update Tool

Posted by Yudi Y.
on 13.13

Written by TomRhodes.

Based on notes provided by ColinPercival.

The base system of FreeBSD includes portsnap(8) for
updating the Ports Collection. This utility connects to a
FreeBSD site, verifies the secure key, and downloads a new copy of
the Ports Collection. The key is used to verify the integrity
of all downloaded files. To download the latest Ports
Collection files, issue the following command:

What this example shows is that portsnap(8) has found
and verified several patches to the current ports data. This
also indicates that the utility was run previously; if it was a
first time run, the collection would have simply been
downloaded.
When portsnap(8) successfully completes a
fetch operation, the Ports Collection and
subsequent patches which exist on the local system have passed
verification. The first time portsnap is
executed, use extract to install the
downloaded files: